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Teen killed by police remains unidentified due to privacy law, state officials say

Whenever the police kill someone in Baltimore, the public learns the victim’s name. A new case may break that historical precedent.

As independent investigators in the Maryland Attorney General’s Office probe the fatal police shooting of a teenage boy on Monday, they say they are required by state law to withhold his identity — and potentially much more related to the investigation.

The Attorney General’s Office is pointing to a broad privacy law that says all records and information contained within them that relate to any juvenile must be shielded from disclosure. The law isn’t new, but the office’s interpretation is.

In October 2022, the office identified a child killed in a police interaction, but it has kept secret the names of three young victims since December 2023.

It was unclear whether the Baltimore Police Department would release the identity of the most recent victim; the agency, like others throughout the state, does release the names of juvenile homicide victims and other juveniles who are killed.

Baltimore Police have said officers saw the boy walking around 9:15 p.m. in the unit block of North Stricker Street showing “characteristics of an armed person,” and that he ran from them and displayed a handgun. Three officers opened fire, killing him.

The boy’s purported first name and picture have been circulating on social media sites such as the Instagram account Murder Ink.

In this year’s legislative session, the Attorney General’s Office advocated for amending the privacy law, which has been on the books for at least a decade, to work around its interpretation. The change, sponsored by Del. Elizabeth Embry, a Baltimore Democrat, would have given young victims’ parents the ability to consent to the release of their children’s names and other information about fatal police-involved incidents.

“One of the hallmarks of our work has been transparency,” Assistant Attorney General Perry Wasserman told a panel. “The concern here is, because of the way is written in Maryland, that a juvenile record has to remain confidential, we would not be able to put out almost anything about the case if what we learned about the case came from that police record.”

The Maryland Office of the Public Defender objected, saying the release of any identifying information related to the police killing of a juvenile “does not further any safety or investigative purpose” and that deference should go to law enforcement.

“The police records are already available to law enforcement and can be shared in a relevant court proceeding under seal,” said Alycia Capozello, a deputy public defender for Baltimore.

The majority of police-involved fatalities do not result in charges or court proceedings.

“There must be transparency around police action that also protects the privacy of children,” Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue said in a statement Wednesday. “The death of a child at the hands of police must not be an opportunity to scrutinize the child victim or shift the focus away from police conduct.”

The Banner previously highlighted how the privacy law was being cited by the Attorney General’s Office to withhold information that had been traditionally released. In March 2023, the office pointed to the law as it blocked information related to a Maryland Capitol Police officer’s use of a Taser on a handcuffed 11-year-old boy. The Banner was later able to obtain some information under another statute, Anton’s Law, that says police disciplinary records should be disclosed.

At the time, some legislators vowed to seek changes to the privacy law.

Other Baltimore-area law enforcement agencies continue to release information about crimes involving juveniles, whether victims or suspects, while withholding their identities.

Baltimore County Police said last year that they “cannot release any record concerning a child” but “will provide details of an incident, as long as the information will not reasonably lead to the identification of the involved child.”

Anne Arundel County Police have said their view of the privacy law is that it is limited to the record itself, not all information contained within it. “It is the opinion of the AACOPD that we have an obligation to inform the public of events,” a spokeswoman said last year.

In Virginia, the legislature passed a law in 2017 prohibiting the release of all juvenile homicide victims without the consent of parents.

Sen. Jill Carter, a Baltimore Democrat who said last year that she would take another look at the law, said this week that withholding information about youth victims of fatal police force “seems like a total obfuscation of the law.”

“The confidentiality protections were intended for child suspects,” she said.

Since its inception in 2021, the Attorney General’s Independent Investigations Division has investigated only a handful of cases involving youths who died in police interactions. The unit investigates such cases and releases body-worn camera and other video, and issues a public report analyzing evidence and the legal questions that arise.

Last year, the division gained the ability to bring charges in the cases it investigates, something that had previously rested solely in the hands of local prosecutors.

Despite holding an outlier view, the Attorney General’s Office did seek changes to the privacy law so that it could provide more public information about its investigations of fatal police encounters.

In her remarks this spring to the House Judiciary Committee, Capozello, the public defender, referenced survivors of police encounters — seemingly out of sync with the proposal’s change relating to fatal police encounters.

“The confidentiality of police records is particularly important given the stigma associated with police involvement that children are ill-equipped to defend against, but will stay with them for years if not decades to come,” she said.

The bill did not emerge from committee.

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